djay for iPad Turns Your Tablet into Turntables

With djay for iPad you can plug in your iPad to a set of speakers or to your laptop and scratch, mix, beatmatch, and spin your entire music collection all night with your fingers on the iPad's screen instead of on your laptop's keys.

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More and more DJs are moving their collections to digital formats exclusively, partially because it's easier to carry a laptop and a hard drive full of thousands of songs to a club than it is to carry a heavy bag full of records or a CD case with a couple hundred discs in it. One pleasant side effect to the change is that you get to hear a broader set of music whenever a DJ performs, and you're less likely to hear the same set over and over again if you see them multiple times.

We've all seen clubs and bars where anyone can bring an iPod or two and make use of the club's sound system to be a DJ for a night, but with djay for iPad you can plug in your iPad to a set of speakers or to your laptop and scratch, mix, beatmatch, and spin your entire music collection all night with your fingers on the iPad's screen instead of on your laptop's keys. djay turns your iPad into a set of portable turntables and a mixer.

djay makes use of a number of features only available in iOS 4.2, so make sure your iPad is up to date before you grab the app. It'll cost you $19.99 in the iTunes App Store, but once you have it installed, the app can instantly access your iTunes library on your iPad and on a connected Mac or PC, and use the songs in your library for mixes. The app turns your iPad display into a pair of turntables that you can touch to scratch, beatmatch manually, cue songs, stop tracks, and even adjust the pitch: almost entirely like a set of real turntables.

The app has a number of built-in controls that help make DJing easier, like a BPM sync feature that automatically beatmatches two songs for seamless play and easier mixing and an automix mode that will automatically blend an iTunes playlist that you've created together into a continuous mix. djay even has an automatic scratching tool that lets you scratch in time with the music while the app crossfades. Most DJs would call all of that cheating, but it's useful if you want to walk away from the turntables for a while.

djay allows you to record your mixes live if you want to share them with friends when you're finished. You can also cue up the next track in your headphones to make sure it's beatmatched and phrased properly before bringing it into the mix, control the pitch, tempo, and EQ visually on the iPad's screen with touch controls.

The app also makes heavy use of iOS 4.2's AirPlay and multitasking features, and can run in the background on your iPad while you bring up another app. If you have an AirPlay compatible speaker dock or device like an Airport Express or Apple TV, you can stream your mix live from djay to those devices. With djay for the iPad, you really can load up your laptop or iPad with music and spin a party anywhere you go.